The biggest thing that has happened to improve the competitive landscape is that T-Mobile has now finally acquired enough spectrum to build out a nationwide 4G LTE network. Before the AT&T merger died off, T-Mobile didn’t have nearly enough spectrum to remain competitive with its rivals in the LTE space, which was a big reason why parent company Deutsche Telekom wanted to sell it to AT&T in the first place: if T-Mobile was doomed as a national carrier anyway, Deutsche figured it might as well get some money for the carrier while it still could.

But then AT&T had to fork over 7MHz of valuable AWS spectrum to T-Mobile as compensation for the failed merger and T-Mobile was suddenly in business. Things got even better for the nation’s No.4 carrier when it subsequently agreed to swap some spectrum with Verizon that will give it access to an estimated 60 million new potential subscribers in the United States.

So as you sit down this fall to figure out which carrier you’ll use for your new iPhone, Galaxy Nexus, Windows Phone 8 device or whatever, be thankful that you still have four national wireless operators to choose from. Because as AT&T and T-Mobile’s recent decisions have shown, we really dodged a bullet when their merger fell apart.